The Ten Best Movies of 2010

Our critics settle their scores, from Toy Story 3 to The Social Network to True Grit.

By Scott Von Doviak and Andrew Osbourne

From the Old West to the birth of Facebook to the fourth level of your dreams, the year in film had something for everyone. Here are our picks for the top ten movies of the year.

10. Dogtooth

Greek filmmaker Giorgo Lanthimos's bizarre fable about a man who keeps his family completely cut off from the outside world plays like an import from a parallel universe. In its depiction of a household with its own rituals, language and belief system, Dogtooth can be read as a metaphor for almost any social or political condition you choose, but it's perhaps best experienced as simply the most confounding, disturbing, and original vision to reach movie screens in 2010. (SVD)

9. Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work

Watching a taut-faced, oft-flummoxed Joan Rivers babbling her way through awkward banter with daughter Melissa for the TV Guide Channel's red-carpet coverage (as cable listings scrolled around them), it was easy to write off the "Can we talk?" comedienne as a befuddled has-been joke. But Anne Sundberg and Ricki Stern's behind-the-Botox documentary restores the original D-List gal to her rightful place in the comedy pantheon, revealing the tough cookie survivor as a vulnerable, whip-smart showbiz pioneer with funnier, edgier material than Kathy Griffin and Sarah Silverman combined. (AO)

8. The Town

It's not just my native Bean-townie bias — after all, I was happy to call bullshit on the bad accents and overpraised melodrahmah of disappointing "Boston noir" potboilers like Mystic River and The Departed. But as he proved in Gone Baby Gone, Ben Affleck has a knack for combining the underdog charm, tribal loyalties, and no-nonsense (sometimes vicious) pragmatism of his New England lowlifes with lived-in locations, sharp dialogue, and wicked-pissah setpieces. And who needs CGI monsters when you've got the simmering menace of Jeremy Renner, Chris Cooper, and Pete Postlethwaite as the world's scariest florist? (Plus, I have to admit to a weird sense of pride at the film's assertion that my town has the world's best bank robbers... in your face, New York!) (AO)

7. Marwencol

This year's strangest yet most affecting war documentary takes place not in the battlefields of Afghanistan, but in the fictional town of Marwencol. Brain-damaged after a barroom brawl, Mark Hogancamp begins to rebuild his life by constructing a scale model of a World War II-era French village, populated by doppelgangers of himself and the people he knows. The stranger-than-fiction twists and turns continue right up through a final revelation that would turn M. Night Shyamalan green with envy, but it's the surprising and poignant way Hogancamp transforms his therapy into art that makes Jeff Malmberg's documentary one of the year's best. (SVD)

6. The Ghost Writer

Roman Polanski's personal life may be a disaster, but he proved he's still got plenty left in the creative tank with this low-key but tightly-coiled Hitchcockian thriller. The story of a ghost writer (Ewan McGregor) who uncovers a conspiracy while digging into the murky past of the British prime minister (Pierce Brosnan) unfolds against a gray, moody backdrop of ominous clouds and sudden rainstorms, and the element of paranoia Polanski perfected in Chinatown and Rosemary's Baby worms its way into every nook and cranny of this suspenseful outing. (SVD)